Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday November 28, 2012 @12:31PM
from the ask-away dept.

Richard Stallman (RMS) founded the GNU Project in 1984, the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and remains one of the most important and outspoken advocates for software freedom. RMS now spends much of his time fighting excessive extension of copyright laws, digital rights management, and software patents. He's agreed to answer your questions about GNU/Linux, free software, and anything else you like, but please limit yourself to one question per post.

What does RMS and other Slashdot readers think about Microsoft's recent offerings to come closer to open source model? Microsoft has Codeplex for open source code and they have made vivid and vast improvements to the Linux kernel and software stack. Is it good that open source is now working closer with Microsoft than ever before?

When passing this question on to Mr. Stallman, try replacing "open source" with "free software". He prefers the term "free software", despite that the Debian Free Software Guidelines are nearly identical to the OSI Open Source Definition.

So since 2009, when FSF's essay on Microsoft [gnu.org] got a major update, is it good that free software communities have begun to work closer with Microsoft than ever before?

I don't see how preferring "free software" over "open source software" makes one touchy or pedantic, given that RMS has stated his reasons for said preference. You may not agree with him, but it doesn't add anything to the discussion to label him.

He doesn't refuse,if you've ever met him. He doesn't. He might repeat again where the difference relies and why he says one instead of the other but, if you meet him, you'll see he is nothing like you portray.

Anyway, it's always easy for people to criticize someone they don't agree with. Specially when they don't adhere to the norm (whether it be for behavior, personality or image).

Ok, but just in this case "opensource" can be substituted by "free software".
The only licence i know that is "opensource" but not "free software" is:
- NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA)
There are not licences that arre "free software" but not "opensource".
Microsoft is not using "NOSA" so microsoft in this case "opensource" might be substituted by "free software".

That just shows you haven't even looked up the difference. I mean, seriously, most new Open Source these days is NOT "Free Software." It does not have a license that uses copyright to pro-actively protect users' freedom. Instead, the software is simply openly available, for free uses, or non-free uses, and including uses that subvert past contributions and create divergence followed by feature lock.

I'm personally not worried about feature lock because my own belief is that as long as I don't rely on closed

I at first thought RMS was being pedantic, but I've come to realise he actually had a point. Its not just enough to let people see the code, the code has to be defended against those who would seek to close it up. We've seen plenty of times where people have tried to take GPL code and close it, and that GPL licence has proven to be a weapon on our side. It provided a (fortunately unneeded) backline defense in the SCO case where if all the other defences failed, we had a final option of pointing to SCO's acceptance of the GPL. We've seen router and set-top boxes stealing peoples hard work on GPL code and we've been able to pry that code back off them. If it was just "open source" we would have had to accept the fail, but because of the *free* stuff , we've kept code free.

Look at the free-software GNU/Linux desktops. Still for the most part free. Now look at android with its open-source userland, locked down almost as bad as the iphones. The difference couldn't be starker.

On a related (if ironic) note, what are your thoughts on where Apple is headed with their walled garden approach (the merits/demerits of it notwithstanding)?

Also, speaking of Apple, where do you see DRM and content copyright going in the coming years?

And I am not just talking about code, but of all content in general -- publishing industry, music/media industry, user generated content etc. Are we headed in the right direction or are we all well and truly f*cked?

People state, quite correctly, that you have worked a lot for freedom. But another thing you're famous for is the beard.

So basically, I look somewhat like a Roman emperor at the moment, and I'm wondering if you can give any tips on how to start looking a bit more respectable. Any general tips for the growth phase? How much work is it when done?

How many centimetres are required for the sudden and unexpected increase in programming ability?

To phrase Spiffmastercow's question in better way: Do you feel that, as a prominent figure in the free software community, your poor hygeine and way you present youself may do significant harm to your cause by giving newcomers a bad impression.

Your monkish lifestyle would leave most people who work in software screaming for a Lear Jet and you have stated "I've always lived cheaply... like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do." Growing up in the United States, I have been served the koolaid of Capitalism several times and I have been taught that the inherent competition and struggle for money in all aspects of our lives make us the greatest country ever. I've read a lot of your comments on intellectual property reform and I can't help but feel that it just isn't compatible with capitalism. Have you ever had problems rectifying your stance on intellectual property with capitalism? Do you see any problems at all with no copyright or patent laws inside a capitalistic society?

I feel like you have this admirable and altruistic quality where money isn't the ultimate driving force and when you speak to people who base their entire lives around money, there's a fundamental disconnect that is overlooked.

Yeah really RMS, who do you look up to yourself? I'll venture to guess Ralph Nadar and perhaps even Mr. Fred Rodgers who are both, (also) impressive Americans that have worked to set stellar examples in their field.

I think copyrights/patents actually work against the concept of free market capitalism. Voluntary exchange means the government or anyone else cannot prevent you from producing anything and selling it at whichever price you desire (including $0), including a copy of whatever else. If you actually optained the original material and those required to produce the copy from voluntary exchange (you paid whatever price was asked for them), you can do what you damn please with them, including destroying them or

What does RMS think about the current situation with open source software where most people think open source just means free? They hardly care about the philosophical aspect of free software but just want something that's free.

A problem with software and operating systems is what I call the "aggregation problem," which is that what we have now is an aggregate of past solutions to problems that may no longer exist. The stuff piles up, increasing complexity and decreasing the uniformity and effectiveness of the interface. At what point do software projects call for a top-down redesign? How can free software do this where industry cannot?

Do you not find it a little hypocritical that you support free software, as it allows all the well known benefits like people collaborating, adding features, fixing bugs, using your code in unexpected ways, and producing generally awesome stuff; but, at the same time support deliberately breaking software designs (e.g. that of gcc), and making it hard to integrate them, edit them, and use them as a third party[1]?

Doesn't that make gcc just as bad as closed source software, as you're going out of your way to make it difficult to do all the great things that free and open software allows?

The parent comment is an obvious troll... but the question at the link is a good one. It asks:

is there a reason for not making the front ends dynamic libraries which
could be linked by any program that wants to parse source code?

I'd like to know if RMS has any further comments on this. I.e., has there been any progress on finding other ways to prevent non-free software from being combined with gcc code, so that offering such dynamic libraries would be possible? If the GPL is not considered sufficient protection, would a stricter license be an option? What avenues are being explored?

The question was not about linking closed source against open source, it was about deliberately breaking the design of the software, and in doing so making life hard for the good guys as well as the bad guys. Because they did this, no one can use gcc's parser/type checker/etc to build an *open* IDE either. That to me rather makes gcc's code the very opposite of open, because it's actively trying to stop me from extending, editing, doing generally awesome things.

That's the hypocrisy, not simply not wanting closed source vendors to grab your code and run (which I quite understand).

The point being that they're not making it difficult to create non-free software, they're making it difficult to create any software, including free software. The point of free software is to allow us all to collaborate, and come up with awesome stuff together, designing it to be difficult to build software that links against it is completely counter to that idea.

As a customer of theirs, I'm sure I'm well in the minority in terms of how I use my devices, and as long as most of their customers have no problem with how they do business and they continue to rake in money hand-over-fist, Apple losing me as a customer is a mere drop in the bucket for them. If the loss of my money and goodwill as a prior customer is not enough, and other people continue to desire and to buy their products, how can we communicate to companies like Apple that the "open" way is a better way, and do so in a language they can understand and respond to?

That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)

Does Kamp have a point? How do you refute his example and his drawn conclusion from it? Have you issued a rebuttal yet?

One of Brooks's many excellent points is that quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that "somebody" can be no more than one single person

Without an intermediary / roadblock, anyone who cares can fix the funny whoppers he found in the article. With an intermediary / roadblock the poor guy would be so horrifically overloaded no one would be permitted by the speedbump to fix the funny whoppers he found in the article.

TLDR of the article: "I found something that sucks, quick, lets insert an intermediary and more processes to slow us down!" After all, that's always worked wonders.

I read that article when it came out, and found it unconvincing. Kamp slams the bazaar model and the entire community for being hackers who patch together endless bandaid solutions which cause more problems which require more bandaids. That strikes me as unfair, and wrong. To suggest there are no talented programmers working open source is ridiculous. Indeed, many of the GNU tools are superior to the original UNIX tools that they cloned. I'll take the GNU tools over the native tools of HP-UX, AIX, or a

What's your opinion regarding the level of freedom provided by various Android devices? In particular, Google's Nexus line, CyanogenMod, and other devices that have been rooted and/or unlocked to varying degrees.

What free software project is using a license that doesn't actually match with it's mission - or hinders free software in other ways? In other words, if you could *magically* switch the license of one project - which would you choose and why?

Examples: Move Mesa to GPLv3, Move Linux from GPLv2 to v3, Make andriod GPLv3, GCC - from GPLv3 to Apache.

How do you see GCC progressing in the future? Several things you argued against (converting to C++, allowing non-GPLed code access to the internals of gcc) are occurring, and gcc is getting major competition from the BSD-licensed clang and LLVM.

If a hardware manufacturer just releases the specification we could create a program to interface with it. If say Microsoft was fully open about its Office Document Specification we could program a 100% compatible system for it.

Having access to Source Code has limited appeal to me. Everyone codes differently and as software gets older it will undoubtedly get to a point where it needs a fresh rewrite. If you release the specs then it allows the freedom of a new system to be made without all the legacy code that most people are afraid to touch.

The argument if the program is Open Source then it is Open Spec, isn't a good one. For example I had to maintain some FORTRAN Code. Then I needed to parse a data file the program made. I had the source... However the Data File wouldn't read when I recompiled the code on a different system. As the Datafile dumped the endianness of the memory into the file. In order for me to parse the file I had to get access to the specification of the original hardware to show me the difference in endianness of the old system with the new one.

Writing code is easy. Remaking code is easy too. Knowing the specification of the program now that is hard. So if there was a bigger push to Open Specification vs Open Source Code, I feel we would have far more software freedom in the world.

I agree with you that the source code is not a complete specification of a program's behavior by itself, but the source code combined with the target platform's ABI is closer to complete. To get around this endianness problem when running the program, you could emulate the original target platform. To get around it when porting the program to a new machine, you could run the program's unit test suite in parallel on the emulated and native systems and then add explicit handling of these implicit assumptions,

The problem with the MOO-XML (Microsoft Office Open XML) specification (all 6,000-ish pages of it) was that it wasn't fully open.

The format, as it started, was rather transparently a 1-for-1 XML serialization of the internal binary data structures of Office. Some bits of it are still blobs, they're just blobs inside an XML / ZIP container.

The "strict" ECMA 376 / ISO 29500 variant is what happened as a result of the consultation process, and even MS Office doesn't support it. It likely never will. Office continues to support new non-XML binary formats.

The only way to implement a lot of the features in the format is to have a comprehensive specification of exactly how the internals of Office behave. In some cases, you probably need detailed specs of the internals of Windows itself - remember all those special API calls in Windows that Office uses? And if you go to all the trouble of producing such a specification - well, it would have been easier and more accurate to publish the source code of the program.

The "Office Open XML" serves two purposes... one, "Office Open" is similar enough to "OpenOffice" to introduce a desirable level of confusion. Two, it allows anyone who has an organizational policy to support Open formats, as you describe, to check a box on the form that says MS Office supports a "Standard" open format. Because the matter is complicated (and the spec is 6,000 pages long), investigating this claim takes so long that the purchase order to renew MS Office licenses can be signed while the arguments still go on. Those persons with a vested interest will shake hands, public money will go into corporate coffers, etc.

How about this : the UK National Health Service once had an agreement to cover all it's users with MS Office licenses. The 3rd largest employer in the world, with over a million employees, a back-of-napkin calculation would suggest that the cost per year must have been on the order of $100M. Imagine what could be done for an open office suite with even a fraction of that. I think someone did imagine it at Microsoft UK HQ - the licensing agreement was broken off, and now individual healthcare trusts negotiate for their licensing deals - which is more likely ; someone saying

* "Oh my, MS Office licenses are costing us $100M - let's divert $30M a year into LibreOffice and use that instead across the whole NHS"OR* "Oh my, MS Office licenses are costing us (a few tens of thousands) - let's divert (a few thousand) into LibreOffice and use that instead, even though no-one else will be"

Several kinds of software have historically depended on the business model of restricting distribution. One is video games. Video games consist of far more than a computer program; they also consist of so-called "assets" [wikipedia.org], such as textures, meshes, maps, audio, and other kinds of non-program works for which you don't want people using the term "content" [gnu.org]. In a world where all software is distributed under a free software license, how would the development of new video games be financed? The model of selling support, which Red Hat has successfully applied to business software, might work for massively multiplayer online games but wouldn't work so well for anything else because a single-player game doesn't need much support after the sale once it's running.

You're a fan of science fiction and speak Spanish and French. Do you know of any good Spanish and French sci-fi that English speakers should look into? The field seems to be dominated by English writers and I've been making an effort to reach out to foreign authors and looking for translations. And if you don't know of any, who are your current favorite sci-fi authors? Any unknown sleepers that you've found that people should read?

I just read "Roadside Picnic" and it was so good, I was surprised I had not heard of it until recently.

Several kinds of software have historically depended on the business model of restricting distribution. One is tax form preparation software. In a world where all software is distributed under a free software license, how would continuing updates to tax software be financed? Converting the annual changes to the tax codes in dozens of jurisdictions to a machine-readable expert system [wikipedia.org] is time-consuming and requires the effort of people who are experts in both tax law and software engineering. Perhaps the key

Although GNU and the FSF's views are often thought to be exactly the
same as yours, they are not. GNU and the FSF are many other people and
although they overall have the same aims, individuals associated to
each organisation may deviate slightly from your views.

The FSF right now is pretty indepenent from you. John Sullivan is
actively leading it, but there
are other very public
members [fsf.org] of the FSF. It has become independent from you, even if
you're still the president of the FSF. Unlike its beginnings, the FSF
is also no longer primarily concerned with creating free software, but
rather it is now involved in campaigning for free software. Social
activists mostly aligned with your views have replaced the hacker
majority in the FSF.

GNU has no such clear independence. You have the final say on aything
that happens in GNU, such as for example usinng bzr as a DVCS for
Emacs, a choice of dubious tactical advantage that has generated much
discontent. You have nevertheless vetoed any dissent on this topic.
Your health is apparently deteriorating, and I hesitate to think what
will become of GNU when you die.

Is there any clear path for the future governance of GNU you in the same way
that the FSF has done this?

In retrospect, wouldn't free and open source software have been better off if the FSF had actively been promoting the use of the (New) BSD and MIT licenses? Or better yet, the use of unlicensed [unlicense.org] software?

During a Q&A Session a while back [archive.org] you were asked about people and movements near and dear to your heart and you said "I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did." I love World War II history and I also find myself in a love-hate situation with Churchill. Could you go into further detail about what specifics lead you to single out these two over leaders like Lincoln, Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin or even historical figures who have enabled information itself like Turing, Shannon, etc?

If RMS really admires these two, then my respect for him has gone down.

Winston "let's fuck up attacking the Ottomans" Churchill.Winston "give India home rule? not on my watch" Churchill.Winston "we can't have an election, there's a war on" Churchill.Winston "let's shoot the natives because they are savages" Churchill.Winston "Bolshevism must be strangled in its cradle" Churchill.The man who wanted to machine gun striking miners, and admired Italian fascism.The man who talked of Jewish Conspiracy.The man who

Hey RMS I enjoyed listening to your "recent" interview on hacker public radio (its a podcast, or more accurately a syndication of podcasts, or something like that)

Anyway you talked a little about your wide ranging tastes in music and I've always wondered if you (or anyone else) has analyzed taste in specific genre of music vs taste is specific genre of programming. Like people who like psy-trance really like functional programming languages. Or wider range, like the most genre of music you like, the more

GNU is supposed to be a free operating system as well as a group of
people working towards building this OS. To a casual observer,
however, GNU does not appear very active. Some of the most prominent
and supposedly GNU packages, such as Gimp, Gnome, GTK+, and R are
mostly GNU in name only. The hackers working on these projects have
very little interaction with other hackers working on GNU projects and
they very frequently espouse views contrary to GNU's philosophical
aims. Thus to an outside observer, GNU does not appear to be a
cohesive group of people working towards a common goal. Many GNU
mailing lists being private further the public perception that GNU is
not even actively producing software anymore.

What can be done to remedy this situation? How can we strengthen GNU,
make it reach out again to the people it's supposed to be freeing?

(insert my standard question for all tech type people)Give me your best hack. Specifically something YOU did personally not hire / grad student.Hardware, software only (yes yes the GPL is cool but I'm looking for code or schematic or at least a description of something made out of source or solder)

I can't put words in your mouth but the ideal answer would be something like "I'm particularly proud of the O(n) memory garbage collection routine in emacs implemented around '89 and how it worked was very roughly..." or "I really like my homemade fully automatic automotive relay based routing system for my OH scale model railroad sorting yard" or "I built my own legal limit ham radio amplifier" almost certainly a different topic of course, but something of this form of answer.

IIRC at least once, some lin... er... GNU/Linux distro packagers modified some referral codes kept in the source of a program, overriding the upstream authors' choice, which would deprive them from the donations of the modified package.

This seems technically compatible with the freedom allowed by GPL, what do you think of such a practice, anyway?

What ever happened with the stolen bag and laptop? Did you get something back? Did you LOSE data (that is, was something not backed up)? Are you mad with the organizers / country that hosted the event?

Mr. Stallman the free software movement have as its name implies focused on free software. But there's a lot of other areas where the same principles can apply. For example literature, music and movies are in a similar field. But interesting areas could also include things like electronics and hardware design, or even medicine. What's your opinions on a free software-like movement surrounding areas like those?

It's well known that not everybody shares the same enthusiasm for open software, and sometimes this enthusiasm borders on a religious fervor that alienates people by being confrontational and borders on "my free software philosophy is right and yours is wrong".

This can cause people to start tuning out the entire viewpoint and stop listening -- it certainly has for me.

So, why should we care? And why must software be open to your standards?

WE NEED an extremist like RMS. I agree that he is out there, but his extremism provides weight to our side of the scale, even if you and I personally find it distasteful. Take him with a grain of salt and you will realize that he has good ideas, turned up to 11.

There are two kinds of people, those who use proprietary software but are ignorant of the freedoms they give up as a result and those who willfully forego those freedoms in exchange for the convenience. I count myself in the latter camp. In some ways I feel badly about it but in other ways it seems impractical. I don't want to spend large chunks of time battling configuration problems and bugs or miss out on all the wildly cool proprietary software that's available. I simply don't have your kind of monkish-like fortitude to use only free software.

There is a provision in the US Copyright Act allowing one to use a small subset of code under fair use. Slashdotters might look at it from the point of view of sampling non-free, closed source into their own code and claim that their sample is so small it must qualify as fair use.

You wrote the GPL so that proprietary companies couldn't lock free code. My question is related to the reverse approach, where a proprietary company "samples" some free code and claims fair use. While you certainly consider this unethical, what protection could you think of to prevent such events? Would you want to prevent such events?

What parts of distributions you believe should be called GNU/Linux should be replaced so they are no longer GNU and can be plain Linux, just as you have never insisted *BSD be called GNU/*BSD? The Linux kernel itself is _not_ GNU, and *BSD also uses gcc. Most users make little use of bash or fileutils and many used KDE.

How can we reverse the trend of more and more devices only running code signed by the manufacturer?

That every new PC, which almost invariably comes with Windows 8, will run only Microsoft operating systems by default is very scary. Sure, you can disable that in current versions, but what about the next version?

I personally am dreaming of either quantum computing or a major breakthrough in the hidden subgroup problem to destroy RSA, DSA, and ECDSA, but won't hold my breath...

In the marketplace, it seems that consumers generally prefer the convenience of proprietary devices like the iPhone and the Kindle over free alternatives like a GNU/Linux laptop. Freedom does not seem to be winning in the marketplace. Why do you think that is?

Do you think it would be of benefit to lobby for a law to mandate factories putting warning stickers "Warning! this is not a general purpose computing device!" on all computers that are sold to end users that have been tampered with so as to remove the 4 freedoms?

I think the law changes much more slowly than technology, therefore it's probably best to have a protective law in place before manufacturers try to "slowly boil the frog" and force first this new UEFI and later maybe even more onerous locked-down computer devices on us, all the while pretending they are similar or equal in value to the consumer as the regular "general purpose computers" we are used to buying today.

Here in the EU you can only sell chocolate labelled "chocolate" if it fulfils certain quality criteria, e.g. cocoa content, otherwise it should be labelled "cocoa fantasy" (Dutch example: Koetjesreep [wikipedia.org]).

It would be very nice for all of us, not just the nerds, to be able to go to a computer shop and see quickly whether the device we want to buy is a "computer" (i.e. what we call general purpose computers today) or it has a label "fantasy computer", where the fantasy is that you own and control the device you paid for.

Do you welcome the personal attacks by folks who disagree with your beliefs? I enjoy seeing them, and imagine a smoke filled room of crooks deciding they can't disagree logically with your position, so they'll make fun of your beard instead. In other words, they have decided you won and its all down to PR damage control and delaying tactics at best. I like this. Well it would be nice if they were more civilized, but I'm content with the winning part anyway.

Since then I remembered what the conversation was about, and he was trying to really nail you down on how authors and other content producers would get paid in a post-copyright world. As i remember, by the time I came to the show, you guys were seriously in the weeds with details of how a micropayment system could work to allow people to "tip" the producers of content that they like, in real time as they use it.

That was probably close to a decade ago.... I am curious as to where those debates are going for you now that time and technology have evolved? Is that still a hypothetical rat hole that you go down, or has something else, either implemented or imagined, caught your eye?

Mr. Stallman, thank you for all the hard work you have done to promote computing freedom. I know that many people consider your views to be excessively dogmatic, but more often than not, your ideas and predictions turn out to be correct. Thank you for steadfastly holding to your principles while most people opt for convenience, as you have made the world a better place.

It appears to me that Apple, of all companies, has ironically played the biggest role in ending the use of DRM in the music download industry. As I see it, the music companies were so afraid of Apple's rise in market share that they decided to sell everything DRM-free rather than let Apple control the distribution channel with its FairPlay scheme. As a result, it is now the norm that music tracks purchased online are unencrypted and carry at most a watermark.

I acknowledge that Apple is horribly hostile to computing freedom in so many ways. It's therefore ironic that their dominance with the iTunes Music Store has led to the end of DRM in the music download industry, purely through capitalistic means and without preaching or legislation. My question, then, is this: Could it be possible to promote computing freedom by gaming the market (playing companies off each other) rather than preaching on a soapbox?

Pirate Parties have recently started to become a considerable political force in northern Europe. Do you support them? Could you suggest a better name for them? What advice would you have for their political strategy?

Good or bad?Specifically with regard to automated and robotic replacements for human labor (now down to about $15,000 per year for a robot that can work for 3 shifts), do you think it's reasonable to presume a crisis of the capitalist model due to nearly complete automation?

Serious question here. You've been warning people about the need to protect and preserve essential freedoms from being lost for literally decades now to very little avail. Your stories intended to be glimpses into a bad future where we no longer have the four freedoms are becoming more and more prophetic seeming by the day. And yet, there is very little change to prevent the dystopia you warned of from coming to pass.

How do you handle the frustration, anger, disappointment and personal attacks?

Also, thank you for seeing the need and establishing the GPL and GNU to fight for our future freedoms!

Nothing about the GPL keps you from monetizing *your* code, it only keeps you from monetizing *my* code in a manner that doesn't benefit me as well. If you want to monetize my code, pay up. The price is that you release your own modifications on the same (or more generous) terms. If you don't like those terms you're welcome to contact me directly to negotiate others.

As for games - it's called content. Just because you have to release the source (aka

This is the original BSD license, modified by removal of the advertising clause. It is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

This license is sometimes referred to as the 3-clause BSD license.

The modified BSD license is not bad, as lax permissive licenses go, though the Apache 2.0 license is preferable. However, it is risky to recommend use of “the BSD license”, even for special cases such as small programs, because confusion could easily occur and lead to use of the flawed original BSD license. To avoid this risk, you can suggest the X11 license instead. The X11 license and the modified revised BSD license are more or less equivalent.

However, the Apache 2.0 license is better for substantial programs, since it prevents patent treachery.

There is also an article [understandinglimited.com] I found on this exact subject, where Stallman says the following:

Freedom means having control of your own life; “Freedom of choice” is a partly accurate and partly misleading way to describe that, and taking that expression too literally leads to mistaken conclusions. Thus, I say I advocate “freedom” — not “freedom of choice”. This always leads to the question of “which freedom?” In the area of software, I want a society in which users are free to run software, free study and change its source code and make their changed versions run, and free to redistribute changed and unchanged versions. In other words, a society in which non-free software more or less doesn’t exist. Establishing a free society that endures generally requires not allowing people to give up freedom. In other words, it requires inalienable rights. I do not want a society in which people had those freedoms only until they gave them up. I do not say this with the expectation that you will agree with me. It sounds like you are as firmly convinced of your views as I am of mine. I hope, though, that at least you will understand better what my position is.

A lot of these questions are answered on the philosophy [gnu.org] section [gnu.org] of his page.

Basically, RMS derives everything from the four freedoms: the freedom (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions.
If you accept those freedoms, it makes sense to avoid the BSD licenses, because they allow middle-men to deprive end-users of some of these rights. Of course, not everyone thinks those freedoms are important

"The freedom to run the program, for any purpose" This includes the freedom to use a program to kill or torture people. Don't you think it is time to include a clause that forbid this kind of "freedom"?

I'm pretty sure he'd say no. The license of GlovePIE software is non-free because it includes a restriction against the sort of military use you envision.